In Africa, Free Schools Feed a Different Hunger

By CELIA W. DUGGER

Published: October 24, 2004

More than 200 first graders, many of them barefoot, clothed in rags and dizzy with hunger, stream into Rebecca Mwanyonyo's classroom each day. Squeezed together on the concrete floor, they sit hip to hip, jostling for space, wildly waving their hands to get her to call on them. Their laps and the floor are their only desks.

One recent afternoon, the line of wiggly children waiting to have Mrs. Mwanyonyo check their work snaked around the bare, unfinished classroom walls. Girls and boys crowded around her, pressing their notebooks on her. Some cut in line. Fights broke out. Boys wrestled. Girls dashed from the room. Giggles and shrieks drowned out her soft voice.

Mrs. Mwanyonyo pulled a boy in front of her and eyed his attempt to list his numbers. ''Can you write 1 and 2?'' she asked quietly. His head sank to his chest as he shook it no. While she laboriously graded each child's work, the noise level rose to deafening. ''Quiet, keep quiet!'' she shouted, her voice on the edge of desperation.

Overnight, more than a million additional children showed up for school last year when Kenya's newly elected government abolished fees that had been prohibitively high for many parents, about $16 a year. Many classrooms are now bulging with the country's most disadvantaged children.

Kenya is not alone. Responding to popular demand for education, it is one of a raft of African nations contending with both a wondrous opportunity and nettlesome challenge: teaching the millions of children who have poured into schools as country after country -- from Malawi and Lesotho to Uganda and Tanzania -- has suddenly made primary education free. Mozambique will join them in January when it abolishes fees.

The explosion in enrollments has put enormous pressure on overburdened, often ill-managed education systems.

What hangs in the balance is the future of a generation of African children desperately reaching out for learning as a lifeline from poverty, even as poverty itself presents a fearsome obstacle.

Near the end of a school year that runs from January to November, Mrs. Mwanyonyo, an earnest wisp of a woman, is still struggling to teach most of her students the alphabet and basic counting. She knows the names of only half of them. She estimated that 100 of her 250 students -- split into morning and afternoon shifts -- would have to repeat the grade.

Salama Kazungu, a willowy girl of 12, sits among Mrs. Mwanyonyo's multitudes, her small shapely head rising above those of the 6- and 7-year-olds. She failed last year in the class of another first grade teacher who had 248 pupils. (''If I could have, I would have run away,'' the teacher confided, relieved he has just 110 pupils this year.)

Not Enough to Eat

It is hard for Salama to learn because her belly is often empty. Her mother sells charcoal but makes too little to buy enough food. Salama never eats breakfast. For supper, she often has only boiled greens foraged from the wild.

On her hungriest days, the child said, she looks at Mrs. Mwanyonyo and sees only darkness. She listens, but hears only a howling in her ears. Yet she is determined to continue. At 12, she has already had her fill of the African woman's lot: fetching water, collecting firewood and carrying it to market on her back like a beast of burden.

''I was always working and working,'' she said. ''I told myself that the best way to get out of this is to come to school and get an education.''

In large measure, the idea of free education has gained powerful momentum because politicians in democratizing African nations have found it a great vote-getter. Deepening poverty had meant even small annual school fees -- less than an American family would spend on a single fast-food meal -- had put education beyond reach for millions.

The abolition of school fees is also owed to the changing politics of international aid. In the 1990's, the World Bank, the largest financier of antipoverty programs in developing countries, encouraged the collection of textbook fees. Its experts had reasoned that poor African countries often paid teacher salaries but allotted little or nothing for books. If parents did not buy them, there often were none.

But evidence began to mount that fees for books, tuition, building funds and other purposes posed an insurmountable barrier for the very poor.

In 1996, Uganda's newly elected president, Yoweri Museveni, abolished fees for four children per family. His message that education was free sounded through the country like a clanging school bell. In 1997, 2.3 million additional children showed up for class, nearly doubling enrollment to 5.7 million.

Then in 2000, world leaders met in New York and agreed on an agenda to reduce global poverty, setting as one of the main goals that every child should be able to complete an elementary education by 2015.

That same year, Congress, lobbied by advocacy groups for the poor, adopted legislation requiring that the United States oppose World Bank loans conditioned on user fees in education. In 2002, the World Bank, already supporting several free education initiatives, officially reversed its policy, deciding to oppose all such fees.